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According to the Associated Press, the Eastman Kodak Co. announced Monday it is retiring “Kodachrome,” its popular flagship line, because of declining consumer demand.

Conceived in 1935, Kodachrome is considered by many to be the first successfully marketed color still film. Thanks to its elimination of the complicated “screenplate method” used in earlier formats such as Autochrome and Dufaycolor, Kodachrome accessibility and relative ease of use became a staple of amateur and professional photographers alike, and was frequently used by national and international media in its heyday.

Currently, sales of Kodachrome represent a fraction of 1 percent of Kodak’s overall sales. The rest is in digital images and transfer of media, such as film to DVD or CD.

“Those numbers and the unique materials needed to make it convinced Kodak to call its most recent manufacturing run its last,” said Mary Jane Hellyar, outgoing president of Kodak’s Film, Photofinishing and Development Group.

In 1973, Paul Simon, then branching out into a solo career apart from Art Garfunkel, recorded the song, “Kodachrome,” on his “There Goes Rhymin’ Simon” album. It shot to No. 2 on the Billboard Top 100 chart overnight, and forever seared the film stock into the minds of Baby Boomers.

“They gave us these nice bright colors. They gave us the greens of summers,” he sang. “Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, so Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away.”

For Steve McCurry, the passage of Kodachrome into the history books is an end of an era for him, as well as countless professional photographers and reporters.

“I want to take the last roll with me and make every roll count, just as a way to honor the memory and always be able to look back with fond memories at how it capped and ended my shooting Kodachrome,” he said in a telephone interview from Singapore.

During a 25-year career, McCurry covered several international conflicts, most famously the 1980-88 war in Afghanistan between the Afghan mujaheedin and Soviet troops, disguising himself in native dress and concealing his camera by sewing it in his clothes. His 1987 photo, “Afghan Girl,” which became synonymous with the plight of refugees in the region, was shot in Kodachrome.

While McCurry mostly shoots in digital media now, many of the iconic images he captured via Kodachrome, including the “Afghan Girl” photo, are on display in Singapore’s Asian Civilizations Museum, and upon Kodak’s announcement, the company has added his image to a compilation of photos commemorating the anniversary of Kodachrome on its Web site.

Ironically, despite Kodachrome’s popularity, thanks to a special formula which requires sensitive or hard to acquire materials, as a rule, Kodak manufactures it only once a year.

That hasn’t stopped devotees from stocking up. According to Hellyar’s own estimates, though the retail supply of Kodachrome is expected to run out this year, many in the company are expecting it to run out much sooner, thanks to efforts by fans to stockpile the material. That means good business for specialty photo outlets, which, thanks to a 1954 Supreme Court case, are the only ones able to carry the item.

As for Eastman Kodak, they are moving on from Kodachrome. According to Hellyar, the company has introduced seven new professional films and seven motion picture films in the last five years, all to critical acclaim, as well as maximized efficiency in its production line. But its philosophy of quality and customer satisfaction remains at the core of Kodak’s philosophy.

“Anywhere that we can have common components and common design and common chemistry that let us build up multiple films off these same components, then we’re in a much stronger position to meet customer’s needs,” Hellyar said.